Friends of Buckland Church - Tasmania

20/06/2026

Beautiful craftsmanship from our stonemasons at Tasmanian Heritage Masonry on the repairs in this corner of the church wall. 🙏 Looks amazing 🤩
The National Trust of Tasmania

15/06/2026

Work is underway once again at the church, with further stone restoration and repair works taking place. Our wonderful stonemasons are slowly chipping away on the church wall, helping to preserve this important historic feature for years to come. Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest in our beautiful old church. Your support makes this work possible. ⛏️👷

08/06/2026

***NOTICE OF MEETING***
There will be a General Meeting of Friends of Buckland Church on Sunday 14 June 2026, 2pm at the Buckland Hall - all welcome. ⛪️

05/06/2026

02/06/2026

Early morning at the church. 🌔

Image courtesy: Van Experiences Tasmania

01/06/2026

A friend of Buckland Church recently discovered this gorgeous little printed Christmas service program from the Buckland Parish for Christmas 1939 🧡

30/05/2026

This very early landscape photograph of Buckland taken from the north unfortunately doesn’t have a date but you can see the Buckland Church proudly standing on the hill, Ye Olde Buckland Inn and some of the original homes and cottages in the town 🏠 What can you recognise from the photo?

17/05/2026

WHAT IS A PINETUM?
St John the Baptist Church Buckland is one of two surviving examples of Anglican churchyard pinetums in Tasmania. Erected in the 1840s under the guidance of Reverend Frederick Cox, the church's grounds are considered one of the earliest examples of a symbolic "pinetum of religious trees" planted around a walled churchyard in Tasmania. The other is Christ Church in Longford, built between 1839 and 1844.

The triangular, upward-reaching shape of many pines was often used to represent the Trinity in Christian traditions. The planning of Buckland during the "golden age" of c. 1825 - 50, centred on the moral and artistic welfare of its rural inhabitants, encapsulated in the church, in the newly fashionable reformed Gothic taste. Set within its walled churchyard on a small hill, at the traditional entrance to the town, enshrouded in a pinetum of symbolic religious trees it was to be the first of its type in Tasmania (extract from Warwick Oakman's Background History 2013).

The pinetum at the Buckland Church is only partially surviving with some of the pines having been removed over the years, without an understanding of the symbolic and heritage value of the pinetum.

The National Trust of Tasmania
The Australiana Society

10/05/2026

A heartfelt thank you to Warwick Oakman for delivering the fascinating 'Windows to the Past' talk as part of the Australian Heritage Festival over the weekend. Warwick’s insights into the history of our church and local community were greatly appreciated by everyone who attended.

Thank you to all those who attended for your interest and kind donations. 🙏

A big thank you to all of our wonderful volunteers who generously contributed to the refreshments at the Buckland Hall afterwards and helped on the day. Your support not only created a warm and welcoming atmosphere, but helped raise valuable restoration and maintenance funds for the church. 🧡🧡🧡

For those who attended — or anyone interested in learning more — a link to a PDF extract from a report prepared by Warwick back in 2013 is included below, featuring some of the church history shared during the talk.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VSvDeJXpvpFkkKi_ZW-COUdJaAi-VQRa/view?usp=sharing

The National Trust of Tasmania